The Amazing Brain Train from Grubby Games

Brain training comes to Linux with The
Amazing Brain Train from Grubby Games.

Back in issue
#164 of Linux Journal I reviewed a trio of
Linux-compatible games from Grubby
Games. Well, the developers
have recently added a new game to their lineup called The
Amazing Brain Train. This game follows in the footsteps of
other recent "brain training" games that have appeared on console
and handheld game systems over the past couple of years.

Like all of Grubby Games' offerings, The Amazing Brain
Train is available for the Linux, Windows, and Macintosh
operating systems. When purchasing the game, their online store
will attempt to detect which OS you are using and offer it up as
a sugestion as the version you probably want to buy, but you are
still given the option to purchase whichever OS version you would
like.

If you want to try out the game before purchasing, there is a
time-limited demo version that you can download. You won't get
very far before the time limit kicks in, but you will be able to
play a good selection of the mini-games. Even better, if you
decide to purchase, your scores and progress will be picked up by
the full version, so you don't have to worry about losing the
progress you've made in Quest mode and having to do things all
over again.

Shortly after purchasing the game, I received an email with a
special download link to a 27MB tar.gz file. Once untarred I had
a folder called The_Amazing_Brain_Train. I chose to put the
folder in my /usr/share/games folder along with my
other games, but in reality, it could have been placed anywhere.
I then created a launcher for the program to make it easy for my
kids (and myself) to launch it.

A simple Gnome launcher.

One nice addition to The Amazing Brain Train that is
lacking in other games from Grubby Games is the inclusion of a
nice icon in .png format. It's not a big deal, but it makes the
launcher look a lot nicer.

The program that you actually run to launch the game is called
run.cmd. This is a simple shell script that performs some library
checking and then actually launches the game.

The Amazing Brain Train.

Like the rest of the games from Grubby, The Amazing Brain
Train is very polished. The visual style is consistent (and
meshes nicely with the previous games from Grubby) and the
animations are charming. The sound is also top notch with the
music and sound effects matching the action on the screen
perfectly.

The game ran without a hitch on my two test boxes: one laptop
with a Pentium M 1.6 processor running Ubuntu 7.10, and the other
with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ and Ubuntu 8.04. The system
requirements state that the game will run on
a computer with at least a 500 Mhz processor and 256MB of RAM,
and based on the excellent performance I saw, I'm inclined to
believe them.

I probably should admit that I did have one issue with sound
output on my AMD box, but that turned out to be the fault of my
sound card and not the game. Once the sound card was configured
properly, sound in the game worked perfectly.

The game defaults to running in full-screen mode. This, along
with several other options, can be changed on the Settings
screen.

The Settings screen.

You can also change the controls on a per-mini-game basis,
which can really help as you try for that elusive high score when
in "Quest" or "Test" mode where speed and accuracy are key.

As far as the mini-games go, The Amazing Brain Train
contains 15 different games that are organized into five
categories: Search, Planning, Spatial, Memory, and Numbers.

Overall, I found the games to be fun to play, and levels are
somewhat randomized so they never play exactly the same way
twice. This allows them to stand up fairly well to repeated
playings. There are a couple that I find more tedious than the
others, but that is due more to personal preference than to the
mini-game itself being faulty.

That's not to say that there weren't any faults. No game is
perfect. Even slick commercial ones like The Amazing Brain
Train. For one, I found the quest mode to be too tedious.
Quest mode takes place on a map that contains a winding railroad
track. At first, only the outer loop is completed. The goal is to
unlock the inner parts of the track so that you can reach all of
the animals. Each animal has various quests that you can complete
for them. For the most part these involve fetching one or more
items from other animals around the track. Successfully
completing a quest will either unlock a locked mini-game or allow
you to add another track segment.

Quest Mode

The tedium comes in because almost invariably the item you
have to fetch is all the way on the opposite side of the track.
In order to power your train to get to where you need to go you
need to complete mini-games to give your train "fuel". The better
you do on a mini-game, the farther you go. I was fine with this
for the first few quests, but as I kept going, it became more of
a chore than a pleasure. My advice is to work on quest mode in
small chunks. For me this meant never completing more than one or
two quests in a single sitting.

Thankfully there are two other modes besides Quest Mode. Test
mode gives you a 5 mini-game "test", after which you are given a
grade of "A", "B", "C", "D", or "F". While playing I never saw a
score below a "B-" so as a test, I deliberately played so that I
received a score of 0 for each mini-game and I found that while
the game never lets your score fall below zero, it
is possible to receive an "F", but I had
to work at it.

After completing Quiz mode you are given a grade.

One nice feature of both the Quest and Test modes is that you
can submit your high scores to a global scoreboard. Getting on to
the upper levels of the all-time high score list looks to be
pretty hard (I was usually somewhere in the mid 300's in
placement), but there is also a daily high score list that I was
able to break into the top ten on with some of my better (well,
luckier) scores.

The "Cosmic Cube" spatial mini-game.

The final gameplay mode is Test. This lets you play any of the
mini-games you have unlocked with or without the normal time
limit. During Quest and Test modes, each mini-game has a fixed
time limit, so the Test mode is nice if you want to play a
particular mini-game at a more relaxed pace. For my oldest
daughter, this is her preferred mode.

The controls for each mini-game generally work very well. For
many of them, you use the mouse to select the correct response to
a question. There are a couple where you use the arrow keys to
guide an animal in the appropriate direction. The only game where
the controls did not work very well for me was the Mouse Maze
mini-game. In this game, you need to guide a mouse through a maze
to some cheese and you can use either the mouse or the arrow keys
on your keyboard to do this. The problem is that both control
modes are not precise enough to avoid mistakes. A few mistakes
are fine when you have unlimited time, but when you are trying to
get through a maze and you only have 5 seconds left on the clock,
the last thing you want is to overshoot the correct path because
of less-than-accurate controls.

The "Mouse Maze" mini-game.

The decision of whether or not The Amazing Brain
Train is a good buy rests with how much you enjoy casual,
brain teaser games. I won't go so far as to say that "brain
training"-type games will make you smarter, but I do find them
fun when taken in small doses. For me, the game is well worth the
$20 it costs.

As far as the opinion of my kids goes: my 9-year-old thought
most of the mini-games were fun, my younger children . . . not so
much. Younger children will especially have trouble with the
mini-games that require math skills.

In the end, I think this is a worthy entry into the "Brain
Training" category of computer games, regardless of platform. If
you like other games in this category, you'll like this one. And
speaking of platforms, it's nice to see a commercial game company
committed to releasing Linux versions of all of their games.

it is not available anymore for linux!
I played the demo and since I knew that the price was now only $6.99 I decided to buy it.
Surprise surprise! If you try to buy the game you can only choose between the win and macOS version. The same with all the others Grubby Games.
I can't believe it. I bought the two Fizzwizzle games a few time ago and I would like to buy the other games but now if you use only Linux like me, you can't...
I think that we should raise our voices...

it is not available anymore for linux!
I played the demo and since I knew that the price was now only $6.99 I decided to buy it.
Surprise surprise! If you try to buy the game you can only choose between the win and macOS version. The same with all the others Grubby Games.
I can't believe it. I bought the two Fizzwizzle games a few time ago and I would like to buy the other games but now if you use only Linux like me, you can't...
I think that we should rise our voices...